Poet and Critic Gopal Lahiri reviews Jonaki Ray’s poetry collection Firefly Memories and calls the experience akin to witnessing firefly moments.
- ISBN:978-88-955826-3-1
- Publisher: Copper Coin, Ghaziabad, Delhi NCR
- Price: INR-399/-
‘Poetry, I feel is a tyrannical discipline. You have got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you have got to burn away all the peripherals.’
Sylvia Plath
‘Firefly Memories,’ the debut collection of poems by Jonaki Ray, explores the past and, maps the path of torrential memories on her liminal poetic space, bringing alongside the warmth and stress, sincerity and urgency resonate in an incantatory power. She truly burns away the peripherals of poetry and writes on to transform the familiar into the new, an important skill for any poet.
In this impressive collection of poems, the scientist-poet offers us crucial moments of life, that come to terms with an array of cultural influences deriving from her Bengali roots and scientific inheritance. She employs an interesting way of looking at the life to which she is deeply connected and refuses to adapt to the conventions of what poetry ought to be. Here is a poet who approaches poetry from ‘Newton’s Third Law’ and ‘Photosynthesis’ to ‘Time is both a Wave and a Line’ and ‘Mashi’s Food Symphony’ with a sharp intelligence and a fair amount of precision.